Trademark Favorite Food

Basic Information

Kojak and his lollipops. Turtles love pizza. Cops and donuts. Shaken, not stirred. This must be the place where pies go when they die!

This characterization trope is in play when a character has a favorite food, and everybody knows it. Characters who are particularly attached to some kind of home cooking or other soul food fit in quite well to this trope.

Related tropes:

• Big Eater
• Comfort Food
• Does Not Like Spam
• Drink-Based Characterization
• Extreme Omnivore
• Hollywood Cuisine
• I'm a Humanitarian
• Impossibly Delicious Food
• Must Have Caffeine
• Obsessed With Food
• Spot of Tea
• Stock Animal Diet
• Sweet Tooth
• Your Favorite

Sources

Bibliography

1. TV Tropes wiki

Game and Story Use

• Just about the easiest seat-of-your-pants way to stick an improvised bit of characterization on an NPC. If you're doing a wide open sandbox game or a series of adventure towns, sooner or later you'll end up with an NPC front and center that you've got nothing planned for. Pick a random food, and voila — instant (shallow) personality.
  • What makes this blacksmith different from the blacksmiths of the last three towns? Uh… he likes… crab apples. Too bitter for most, but this guy loves them. There's three crabapple trees out back, and his workshop is full of tiny discarded cores and stems, and piles of miniature fruits waiting to be chomped on. He spits out apple seeds between every sentence.
• The nature of the favorite food can potentially relate more information about the character. This could be and overt and obvious cue for the players. Or, you might manage to pull off a subtle metaphor that only dawns on the players much later.
  • Perhaps that blacksmith has a crabby and bitter personality. Or maybe they work with metals that other nearby smiths dismiss — such as bog iron or green rocks. Or, just as they prefer miniature bitter apples, perhaps their sympathies and allegiances lie with creatures that are small and bitter, such goblins or dwarves.
  • Alternatively, perhaps the bitterness of the apples simply takes the edge of the thirst and fume taint that he builds up at the forge.
• Their desire for the foodstuff could actual be a minor plotpoint, or even the hook that starts a plotline.
  • The blacksmith has secret meetings with goblin insurgents. Contact with the goblins has spread a blight to his beloved trees. The village doesn't have any Druids, so he offers that if the players can travel into the wilderness and bring back the old hermit druid thereabouts, he'll pay them in upgraded weapons and armor. After some fun wilderness encounters, the PCs find and recruit the druid. They get back to town, and the druid says "this tree is poisoned by goblin magic!" The blacksmith's reaction is angry denial, and it reveals his secret connection to the goblin invaders.
• Can be a sign of an addiction displacement in progress - IIRC Kojak's lollipops were meant to be related to his giving up smoking…
• For games with metacurrency and similar mechanisms, this might be a mechanism for a willpower refresh or something similar … although it might not be appropriate for something easily obtained or which the character might be assumed to pick up by default (such as junk food).